


Lost and Left Behind

by Cards_Slash



Series: Other tragedies and disasters [2]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Loki Angst, M/M, Mild Language, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-25
Updated: 2012-08-25
Packaged: 2017-11-12 20:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/495531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU, Loki was sixteen when he found out that he was adopted.  At sixteen and a half, he ran away from home.</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>Apparently, finding out that he was adopted was not enough personal turmoil for Loki because he had gone off and added having a serious sexual identity crisis on top of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost and Left Behind

Apparently, finding out that he was adopted was not enough personal turmoil for Loki because he had gone off and added having a serious sexual identity crisis on top of it. Thor could care less what sort of person Loki was attracted to so long as they were close to his age or maturity level and consenting; but his parents had a certain set of standards by which they judged any and all things. (To be honest, and Thor did try to be honest to save himself time and grief later on, Loki could have tacked on sexual experimentation to a bad situation just to make it worse. It was just something he would have done.) 

Thor was neck deep in beautiful women, particularly the mousy haired nerd girl that kept a semi-constant place in the library between the hours of noon and midnight. Thor had yet to make it up to talk to her but something deep in his gut (just above his dick, most likely) kept telling him that he really needed to go and talk to her as soon as possible. His involvement in Loki’s personal problems was a casual acquaintance through E-mail and frantic, confusing text messages he got after midnight. Almost every bit of new information he got from Loki seemed to confirm that it was none of his damn business what his brother got up to behind closed doors with whatever guy or girl he found attractive that day but he’d yet to figure out a way to relay the idea of Too Much Information back through his e-mails obviously enough that Loki understood he _didn’t want to know_.

So, he had resigned himself to bouncing between assure his mother that yes all pubescent boys went through a phase where they thought they wanted to make out with guys (he hadn’t, however) and that yes, Loki was smart enough to take care of himself (even though Thor didn’t believe it himself). He nodded along with Loki’s assertions that his parents hated him based on how they seemed strained and appalled to find him wearing more make-up than their mother and hanging out with boys that they considered to be undereducated thugs. Thor was certain that their parents didn’t hate Loki but he wasn’t going to go off and say that because he’d known Loki basically his whole life and one simply did not tell Loki that he was loved despite how difficult he went out of his way to be. And then, of course, something changed.

\--

First it was: 

_New guy at school. He’s wearing purple today._

Just regular texts detailing the mundane and uninteresting day-to-day fashion choices of new students at Loki’s school. Thor tried to keep up with Unnamed New Guy’s fashion choices but he just didn’t care if he paired a purple shirt with black pants or wore a maroon tie or if he wore converse or military-style boots. 

Then it was more like: 

_What do you think he tastes like? He eats nothing but pizza and fries and when I see him in the hallway it looks like he’s chewing gum._

Thor had never had a wandering thought about Unnamed New Guy’s taste before. His answer to Loki had been something along the lines of ‘I don’t know, why don’t you go find out’. It was late when he got the text and he was busy mourning another lost opportunity to talk to Jane (that was her name and it was lovely) so he didn’t care about his baby brother’s love life. 

Still he got:

_It has to be pizza. He eats so much pizza._

This exchange of petty information could have gone on forever (Thor’s inability to speak to Jane, for instance, could have been a family trait and so Loki would have been forever stuck on the sidelines making longing faces toward Unnamed New Guy until he graduated and moved on). Except that Loki, being Loki, couldn’t stand to have a question of his go unanswered. And Loki, being Loki, couldn’t just have walked up to Unnamed New Guy and asked him out but create a set of circumstances that was sure to blow up in face and destroy the semi-calm of their lives.

\--

It was a well-documented fact that nothing happened to Loki that did not also happen to Thor. When Loki was four, he fell out of a tree and landed on Thor. Loki broke his left arm and Thor broke his right arm and they had to take Christmas pictures with ugly sweaters and sweaty casts while they strained their faces to look happy about it. When Loki was six, Thor was eight and Loki decided to take the toaster apart. He sat in the living room with his stick-figure legs spread open around it and pulled the whole thing apart piece-by-piece. He cut open his fingers doing it and the pain wasn’t enough to stop him until Thor found him at it and demanded he stop because he was dropping puddles of blood on the carpet. Loki, instead of stopping, convinced Thor to finish taking it apart for him and they both had bandages on their hands while they spent two weeks grounded to their rooms. When Loki got a black eye at age nine, he celebrated getting punched in the face by a tree by kicking a football into Thor’s face to give him a black eye. And it went on like that, their whole lives.

So imagine when Loki turned up missing from his bed. Thor got the call halfway through his first class of the day and it was only a strange tingle at the back of his neck that made him get up and leave class to answer it. His mother was a rush of tears and frustrated shouts explaining to him how Loki was gone without warning, leaving behind his cell-phone and there was no way to know where he’d gone. She was full of a mother’s fear of kidnapping, dismemberment and death while father, in the background, provided cool asides of his own about how Loki was probably just acting out.

(To be fair, Loki probably was just acting out.)

Thor offered to take a few days off to come help them look for his brother if his mother was certain it was necessary. She sobbed her way through buying him a plane ticket and he was back in his parents’ house before the end of the day.

\--

Loki’s room, always orderly, looked how it had at Thanksgiving. The walls that had been painted a bright shade of white when Loki turned ten and started to develop an unfortunate fondness of absolutes were now covered floor to ceiling with dark bolts of fabric. His window was always-open and his desk—neat to a point of pain—was overflowing with ripped up papers. Thor thumbed through them, tried to piece them back together just enough to figure out what they must have come from but they weren’t recognizable anymore. The drawers of the desk had been pulled out and gone through, everything tossed around and the closet was the same. Boxes and boxes of things that Loki just couldn’t not part with had been rifled through and left open and half spilled out onto the floor. His bed had been pulled apart so that the worn-in and body-scented sheets were half on the floor and his pillows were missing their cases. 

“Your father was looking for some clues,” his mother said from the doorway of the room. She hadn’t stepped into Loki’s room since she was forbidden when Loki turned thirteen and decided he was too old to have her in his personal domain. She respected it then and still now, even after Loki had left without an explanation. Their father never listened to Loki’s demands, always said that he refused to be kept hostage by a child but he’d been amenable to compromises when they could be reached. On the shelves in the room, there were piles of things that looked like they’d been turned around to face the wrong way, stacks of books and trinkets and bottles of nail polish that Loki had collected since he found out he was adopted. 

This room was not a room that would have belonged to the boy Thor remembered his brother being; it was the room of something else—something he no longer knew or understood. With his mother’s careful distance and tear-streaked face at the door and his hands uselessly at his side in this suddenly alien place, Thor felt (for the first time ever) like he had lost his brother. Maybe the realization was always there, lurking around in his mind, maybe it wasn’t a shock so much as the natural consequence of age but he hadn’t realized before that Loki was, for the first time ever, completely unreachable. (More important, maybe, Loki was completely alone, divorced from his family in every conceivable way, half of his own making and half of their docile complacency.)

“Do you have any idea where he went?” his mother asked, “he must have told you something.”

“He—he didn’t tell me anything,” Thor said.

\--

Thor lay on Loki’s bed for a small eternity, took in the smell and feel and darkness of the room, stared at the odd marks on the ceiling from the way the paint had dried. He pieced back together all of the things he had always known about Loki and held them up against the facts that now presented themselves. Loki, careful and methodical Loki, always in trouble, always moving, always sly and quick and still orderly, and now he lived in complete chaos. 

He put his phone against his chest while he laid there, closed his eyes and tried to remember all of the conversations he’d ignored and came up with nothing. The fact was simply that Loki was gone and that he was clever enough that if he did not want to be found, nobody on earth (not even Thor) could find him.

\--

Thor was the eldest and with that came a certain pressure to be-and-behave a certain way. He’d only briefly bristled at his father’s demands before he gave in and followed along the path he had been raised to follow. There were variations and deviations because no son could be exactly the thing that their father wanted, but for the most part, Thor had become his father’s vision. It helped, of course, that he respected his father and that he believed, truly, that underneath his cool exterior and his infuriating insistence on niceties that father loved him and wanted him to be a good man. 

Loki had decided, at age sixteen, that their father was a liar and that he had only taken Loki in out of pity and had only kept him out of obligation and the deep-seated fear of appearing badly to his peers. Loki’s mind was absolute one-way or the other and left no room for compromise or gray areas.

Father was down in his study, staring blankly at his shelves, and Thor stopped by the door for only a minute to watch him, to feel the depth of regrets that must have been hiding inside of him, before he left him again without a word.

\--

The high school hadn’t changed in the year that Thor had been gone. It continued on the same as it had always been, with no radical or bizarre changes. He stopped at the office when he went to visit and smiled at the secretary that recognized him instantly and gave him a visitor’s pass to walk the halls. He went up and down the quiet halls while the students in the classes went on with the business of learning things. There were advertisements and reminders posted on the walls. There was graffiti on the lockers. There was gum stuck to the floor. He stood in the empty space between class rooms and tipped his head back to look up at the banners hanging from the ceiling and wondered if that was where Loki stood and decided he was going to leave without warning.

It must have been somewhere in these halls, the exact place where he’d decided that he wasn’t going to live his life on anyone’s terms but his own and that even if he did go, nobody would miss him so much they’d bother to look. 

When the bell rang, Thor walked with the swelling tide of bodies to the cafeteria and was greeted by familiar faces that asked him how life had been since he graduated and gone away to college. He talked with them, shared stories and details and encouragements and when the conversation lulled he said, “do you know—my brother kept telling me about some new kid that went here that wore purple shirts?”

They all laughed at him, ribbed him about a sudden interest in boys with purple shirts but one of them said, “where is Loki? I haven’t seen him in a few days.” 

“You know Loki,” Thor said, “he’ll show up again soon.”

They knew Loki, in passing, they didn’t know him at all. But one of them said, “the new guy with the purple shirts his name was Clint Barton and he hasn’t been here in a few days either.” 

\--

Clint Barton was the only son of Miranda Barton who worked double shifts at the local pancake house to support the two of them. She’d been sleeping when Thor knocked on her door and seemed confused as to why he was there. When he explained to her, “my brother’s missing and I just thought that maybe he’d gone somewhere with Clint,” she had looked genuinely horrified.

“Loki?” she said, “he’s the sweetest kid that I’ve ever met. He said that his family was going on a trip and he wanted Clint to come if that was okay. I gave them fifty dollars.” She stared at him, sure that he must have been wrong, “he said that you were all going, that you always went, every year. He was so nice.”

Loki was always nice, quiet and solicitous, until he wasn’t.

\--

Thor drove all night, pumped up on Red Bulls and gas station chips. He called his mother from Davenport (they had gone there every year for six years before Loki had out-grown the rental houses and tourist traps) and asked her if there had been any charges on the family credit cards. She was kind enough to check them and report back that there were several new charges and one of them was a hotel. 

Thor found himself at the front desk of the hotel explaining to the confused and then embarrassed and then harassed woman behind the counter that his sixteen year old brother had stolen the family’s credit cards and checked into the hotel and he’d very much like to know his room number and would she please not call ahead to be sure he was there. He got a room key and thanked her. The elevator was very small but it smelled pleasantly of something fruity. 

The hallway was very broad on the top floor and there were windows on either end that ran floor to ceiling to give the best view of all of the attractions that promised visitors the maximum entertainment. Thor found the room (653) and slipped the key card into the slot and pulled it out again. The drone of the TV playing loudly was the first thing he recognized, then the careless heap of his brother’s green-and-black wardrobe thrown all over the couch and table. There were neat stacks of clothes on the desk in the corner that looked entirely too normal to be anything that Loki would deign to wear. The room smelled like stale eggs and fresh coffee with an overlay of hotel shampoo and bar soap. 

Thor let the door slap shut behind him and stepped in farther to see Clint (Unnamed New Guy, formerly), looking at him from the end of the bed. He was freshly showered, wearing black pants and boots that he was tying with one foot on the TV-stand and his fingers curled into the fraying black laces. He had spikey short hair, a confused looking mouth and hickeys all over his chest and neck. There were pink streaks down his back like someone had dug their fingernails in and it was all so much more than Thor needed to see or process.

 

“Uh…” Clint said.

Loki mumbled unhappily from underneath the blankets. Only the tips of his stark-black hair were poking out, sticking up everywhere from oil and the grease he used to keep it normally slicked back. He wiggled around before pulling the blanket down enough to look past Clint’s still hunched-forward back to see him standing there. “They called you,” Loki said.

“Of course they called me,” Thor said, “you ran off without telling anyone where you’d gone and you thought they wouldn’t call me!” 

“They could have called the police,” Loki said. He pulled himself up to sit, still slim and pale and bony. There were marks on his upper arms and one solitary hickey on his collarbone that stood out against the chilled pallor of his skin. “They called you instead.”

“Um,” Clint said again, “hi? Who are you?” Then he turned back, “who is this?”

“I’m his brother,” Thor shouted at him about the same time Loki waved a hand at him, “he’s my brother.”

“You have a brother?” Clint said, “sorry—I’m sorry. I just didn’t realize he had a brothe—wait, why would they call the police? I thought you said that your parents knew you were coming up here. You told me that you knew that you were coming up here.”

“I lied,” Loki said. He said it like it must have been so obvious the whole time. He had lied to Clint’s mother and he had lied to Clint. He must have lied to the woman who checked them in and from all those lies; it should have been obvious to anyone that he was (unrepentantly) a liar. Loki kicked away the blankets and stood up. He was naked and Thor let out a grunt of aggravation as he turned his back and only barely caught the faint smirk on Loki’s face as he did. “Don’t worry,” Loki said, “my brother has told them by now and the whole matter is already resolved.”

“It is not resolved,” Thor said.

“No wait,” Clint said again, “you _lied to me_.” He finally put his foot down from where it had been against the TV stand and stood up. His every little move had anger in it, and his voice got rougher when he spoke. “I only came up here with you because you told me that your parents were okay with it. I only let you lie to my mother because I thought you were telling _me_ the truth. And you lied to me?”

“Yes,” Loki said. 

“You bastard,” Clint said. He shoved past Thor to where his pile of clothes was on the desk and shoved his arms into the sleeves of a very nice maroon shirt with careless violence. He didn’t bother with the buttons but found a complimentary garment back sitting in the chair next to the desk and started shoving his things into it. “You know what,” he said when he finished, “I should have known—I’m stupid. I should have seen through you. I can’t believe that I let you—I just –can’t believe I—” Then he grabbed his wallet from inside the desk drawer and shoved it into his pocket and then grabbed his keys and closed his fist around them. “I’m leaving.”

Then he was gone with a slam of the door.

Loki sighed behind him, “he’s stealing my car.”

\--

Thor did not sit on the rumpled bed but he laid out on the second queen sized bed in the room and took a nap while Loki took a shower. He sent a single text to his mother to assure her that he’d found Loki and then he’d passed out to the familiar sounds of Loki taking hours in the shower. When he woke up the rumpled bed had a distinctly orderly look about it and Loki was full dressed and perched on the edge of the chair he’d dragged over from desk. He’d lost the lip ring since Thanksgiving in exchange for longer hair and a set of gold bracelets that were obnoxiously large for his thin wrist. 

“They should have called the police,” Loki said.

“You shouldn’t have run off without telling someone,” Thor said. He sat up with a groan, ignored Loki’s glower and went into the bathroom to attend to his own grossness. By the time he came out, smelling only slightly better for a quick shower before putting back on the same clothes, Loki had moved from perching on the chair to sprawling on the bed Thor had slept in, looking sulky and irritable while he wrapped himself up in the used blankets. “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked.

“That they wouldn’t care,” Loki said, “that they’d either assume I’d come back or that I did not want to be found.”

“So you were just having a childish fit,” Thor said.

“Like you would know; if you were gone they would have had the Marines out looking for you,” Loki said. He shoved his way free of the blankets, stood up while he said it, towered over him with all his self-righteous anger that made his cheeks pink and his eyes water. He was nothing like the boy that Thor remembered, he’d been replaced with something made of bones, all sharp and defensive and hurtful. “You don’t have wonder if they even care about you because their every minute of the day is devoted to doting on you and assuring you of how much they love and miss you. What am I?” he shouted at Thor, “I’m just something they found on sale and couldn’t return. They don’t even look at me, they don’t even try.”

“Maybe if you didn’t make it so damn difficult,” Thor shouted at him. He stood up too, no taller than Loki but bigger, always bigger, and Loki bared his teeth at him like a wild animal. “You’re hurt,” Thor said, “this isn’t the way to deal with it.”

“Why not?” Loki asked.

“Because it’s childish!” 

Loki scoffed at him, looked over to the side, at the wall, at the plain painting there, at anything but at Thor. When he looked back, he was all blank and still smirking at him, daring Thor to say anything in the contrary. “And yet here you are, the good son, come to collect the unwanted thing that got away. Did father say that he wanted me back or was it Mother that cried to get you to find me?”

Thor was grinding his teeth so hard his jaw was hurting. All at once he wanted to hit Loki and shake him and pull him into a hug to smother him. He wanted to drag him into a fight until they’d blackened their eyes and broken their arms and they were sharing the same life again and he couldn’t because Loki was staring at him like he could see straight through him. Loki accused him of being temporary, of being normal, of being so predictable, of already making plans for when he left again and Thor was left with nothing in his own defense but the knowledge that he still did love Loki even if their lives had broken apart at last.

“I’m taking you home,” Thor said.

“You’re assuming I’ll let you,” Loki said.

“I’m not giving you a choice.” They were going home, back to their family’s house and if Loki ran again, it would be his own problem. Thor couldn’t force him to understand that he was loved any more than he could have forced him to admit that he was hurt. Whatever this thing was that Loki had grown into, it would have to find its own comfort and resolution. 

\--

The drive home was silent, the radio off, the windows rolled down just enough for a whistle of cool wind. Loki sat in the passenger seat with his face turned out and didn’t move from the time Thor shoved him into the car until they parked in their parent’s driveway. Then he let out a noise like he’d been wounded somehow.

“I know,” Loki said to him, “but you always side with them. You’re not my brother and I don’t want you to be anymore.” 

Thor sighed, kept his eyes facing front. “I’ll be here,” he said, “whenever you change your mind.”

“I won’t,” Loki promised him. Then he kicked open the door to the car, “go back to college.”

\--

And after that, for the longest time, he heard nothing at all from Loki. No texts, no e-mails, no calls; he simply ceased to exist except in passing mentions that Thor’s mother made when she wrote him once in a while to keep him up to date on what happened in the family. For months and months, he heard nothing at all.

Then, one text; it said:

_I’ll rip her heart out. I’ll destroy her and you know I will. It’s why you don’t talk to her._

Thor didn’t pause to wonder how Loki had known, didn’t try to puzzle out what he meant, just accept it as it was said, as absolute as it was written, and knew that if ever his brother (the silver-tongued liar) had told the truth, it was with those words.


End file.
